“I wish I knew why you were crying,” I whispered to T.R. She just hugged me and sniffed.
“It’s okay, though,” I assured her. “Cry if you want to.”
The next song was by George Strait and was called “All My Exes Live in Texas.”
“I’m glad that sad old waltz is over,” T.R. said, flinging the last tear out of her eye as she picked up the beat. The beats got faster and faster as the songs she had chosen spun through the jukebox. I danced through six songs, by which time Godwin appeared, in his colonialist mode again, and danced several more with her, after which we all sat down and ate a huge breakfast. Then T.R. insisted on dancing again with me. The café was empty by then, all the customers having gone to work. Godwin sat at the counter and read Aunt Jimmie’s paper while we danced.
“It’s funny when you get your dream, ain’t it?” T.R. said. “All through high school I’d watch other girls dancing with their daddies and I’d dream I’d dance with my own daddy some day.”
“And now you have,” I said.
T.R. looked me in the eye for a long time. Though she was dancing easily, her eyes seemed sad.
“Yep, now I have,” she said.
“Don’t you say nothin’, Daddy,” she added. “Please don’t you say nothin’.”
She didn’t really have to warn me. One of the few things my strange life has taught me is not to try to talk away every sadness that a loved one shows you. I’ve tried that many times and only succeeded in driving the sadness deep as a nail into the loved one’s heart.
With some effort I obeyed my daughter’s injunction and kept silent. Song followed song, and we danced. T.R. soon put her face against my chest again—she danced and cried, cried and danced, through another whole roll of quarters, in Aunt Jimmie’s empty café. Godwin finished his paper, got up, started to come out and cut in, took another look, thought better of it, and went to the car to take a nap. Aunt Jimmie sat at the counter, smoking and filing her nails. Old Walter Wafer, her current dishwasher and consort, took advantage of the morning lull to mop the floor. He tactfully mopped around us, and we danced. Wafer had scarcely finished when the early-lunch crowd began to file in, soon to be supplied with cheeseburgers, chicken-fried steaks, and beer. A little roughneck, tousle-headed and not yet resigned to Balkan disciplines, cast a glad eye at T.R. She caught the glance and marched right over to his table. Her spirits were definitely on the rise.
“Hey, how tall are you?” she asked.
The young roughneck was caught off guard by the question; he looked shy and mumbled a measurement.
“That’s tall enough, get up from there and dance with me,” T.R. said. “I’ve just danced my poor old daddy to a frazzle.”
I went to the bathroom. When I came out I saw that things were fine. The music was faster. T.R.’s skirt was whirling, her long legs were flashing, and even the stolidest dairy farmers were having trouble keeping their eyes on their steaks.
15
T.R. danced happily with the young roughneck until his deckmates finally dragged him out of the café to go back to work—he had to eat his cold cheeseburger on the fly. T.R. followed them out, flirting with the young man, whose name was Dexter, until the pickup drove away.
“What do you think, Daddy, is he cuter than Muddy or not?” T.R. asked.
“Now really,” I said, “I hate to sound like a stern father but I hope you aren’t seriously thinking of abandoning Muddy.”
“You ain’t a stern father and I think of abandoning Muddy every time I see something cuter,” T.R. said. “Wake up, L.J., you’re sleeping your life away.”
“Who’s speaking?” Godwin said groggily. He was often confused for a bit when he woke up from his naps.
T.R. just laughed and drove us home. Muddy was pacing up and down in front of the house, bristling with military equipment. Several trips to the Army-Navy store in Wichita Falls had allowed him to augment his arsenal; he now had binoculars, grenades, and a sniper’s rifle with a starlight scope.
“Earl Dee’s out,” he informed us, as we stepped out of the car.
“Uh-oh,” T.R. said. “We better be leaving then. How far away is he?”
“What I meant is, he’s out of Huntsville,” Muddy explained. “Right now they got him in jail in some place down the road. He shot up a laundrymat.”
“A laundrymat?” T.R. said. “Why would he shoot up a laundrymat?”
“I don’t know,” Muddy said. “I guess one of the washing machines didn’t behave.”
“Maybe it’s all a mistake,” I said. T.R. had turned pale. She was looking at the car as if she wanted to get back in it and go.
“I was just told yesterday that he was still in Huntsville,” I reminded them.
“Oh, them prisons make mistakes like that all the time,” T.R. said. “Half the time they can’t keep track of who they’ve got and who they haven’t. I’m for getting out of here right now.”
“You got a bunch of messages,” Muddy informed me. “The sheriff of the place that’s got him has been calling.”
The house was in something of an uproar. Bo was sitting on Jesse and beating her; Jesse was screaming and bleeding from the lip. T.R. immediately spanked Bo, who began to scream too. Neither Gladys nor Buddy was in evidence. While I was on the phone to the prison in Huntsville they emerged, sheepishly, from one of the bedrooms. Godwin, T.R., and Muddy began to smoke marijuana. Godwin had armed himself with a pistol of mine and kept cocking it and pointing it at the refrigerator while I talked on the phone.
“Godwin, don’t shoot the icebox,” I said.
It didn’t take long to determine that the prison had indeed made a mistake; it was an Earl Dean who had mashed someone’s head in with a cell door, not Earl Dee. I then called the sheriff of Palo Pinto county, who talked for ten minutes about how very much he and his family had loved “Al and Sal.”
“We miss that show, Mr. Deck, I just can’t tell you how much we miss that show,” he said, several times. When it finally dawned on him that I was worried about Earl Dee, he seemed surprised.
“Why, you don’t need to worry, Mr. Deck,” the sheriff said. “You can just ease your mind off, right now. He’s only been out three days and he’s done violated his parole, plus he assaulted a washing machine with a deadly weapon. I’d say that’ll get him at least another year. He ain’t even supposed to have a deadly weapon, and the old lady whose washing machine he shot up is going to press charges. I’d say you and your family should just relax, because this Mr. Dee is looking at quite a bit of additional time.”
“But are you sure there’s no chance of his escaping?” I asked. “He’s threatened my daughter several times and she’s pretty worried.”
The suggestion that a prisoner might escape from his jail took the sheriff by surprise.
“Oh, golly,” he said. “He ain’t gonna escape, we got this man under heavy guard. I been sheriff here sixteen years, nearly seventeen, and we ain’t had no escapes. The only thing of an escape-type situation we had was one little thief who was stealing tools off oil rigs—we caught him and while we was bringing him back he rolled out of the dern patrol car, which was a bad technique, it turned out, because he busted his head on the pavement and we had to pay hospital bills on him for six weeks because the dern deputy hadn’t made sure the car door was locked. With these courts like they are I’ve come to the conclusion it’s best just to shoot people if they try to escape ’cause if they’re dead there won’t be that matter of the county getting stuck with no hospital bills.”
The sheriff went on to assure me that Alcatraz itself was only slightly more secure than the Palo Pinto county jail. He then launched into a discussion of the episodes of “Al and Sal” that he and his family had admired the most. I listened politely; I definitely wanted the sheriff to stay on our side and do his best by us. Meanwhile, panic swirled around me. Jesse continued to scream intermittently, and Bo had a fit and banged his head on the floor. T.R., Muddy, Godwin, Gladys, and Buddy were all
drinking margaritas. All except T.R. and Gladys were armed. T.R. sat with one foot in my lap, chewing lime pulps and listening to me talk to the garrulous sheriff. I rubbed her foot, which seemed to relax her. When the first foot was rubbed sufficiently she exchanged it for the other one, which I also rubbed.
“Well, he’s in jail under heavy guard,” I said, when I finally got off the phone. “I don’t suppose we need to be too worried. They’re planning to transport him right back to Huntsville as soon as the paperwork’s done.”
T.R. had calmed down a bit; she seemed thoughtful.
“How far away is this jail they have him in?” she asked.
“About sixty miles,” I said, trying to remember exactly where Palo Pinto county was.
“Too close,” T.R. concluded. “I ain’t gonna get much sleep with Earl Dee less than a hundred miles away, I don’t care what no sheriff says. You’re always saying we can go anywhere we want to, any time we want to leave.”
“We can, only excluding countries that require passports,” I assured her.
“Fuck countries that require passports,” T.R. said. “Let’s go someplace that don’t require nothing but money, and let’s leave now.”
“I can depart immediately,” Godwin assured us.
“We’re too many for one car,” I pointed out. “Maybe we should go to Wichita and buy a van.”
“Good idea,” T.R. said. “We can fill it up with guns and take off. Call up the van store right now, Daddy.”
I promptly called the biggest van dealership in the area and let the magic of my name and well-publicized fortune do the rest. I was promised the most expensive van in the place, fully serviced and ready to go in thirty minutes. Godwin and I left the rest of them to study a road atlas and went to get the van.
“I can depart immediately,” Godwin repeated several times. I believe he was worried we might leave him behind to lead his own life, something he had given no thought to in several years.
“Godwin, we’re all departing immediately,” I said. “Shut up, you’re making me nervous.”
“I wonder how T.R. met this fellow Dee,” Godwin said. “He must be rather a magnetic personality. It’s been my experience that criminals often are.”
Several times I’d been on the point of asking T.R. what attracted her to a man who would threaten her life, but at the last second I had always pulled back and left the question unasked. Attraction didn’t have to mean, it only had to be. Why was I attracted to women so high-strung and brilliant that if you looked at them twice it would usually prompt a fit? Was it the brilliance that attracted me, or was it the fits, or was it the combination? Who knew? And if I could not answer such a question for myself, there was no point in asking T.R. to try to explain what she had seen in Earl Dee.
“De gustibus,” I said to Godwin as we raced toward Wichita Falls.
“I hate it when you resort to classical tags,” Godwin said.
The van was ready as promised; Godwin insisted on taking the wheel at once, so he drove it and I followed him home in the Cadillac.
We arrived back at Los Dolores to find that panic had somewhat abated, sluiced away by several pitchers of margaritas. The whole gang was sitting around the kitchen table, armed to the teeth, and arguing over the road atlas. T.R. and Muddy were locked into a quiet but deadly debate over our immediate destination. T.R. wanted to go to Disneyland but Muddy had his heart set on Lake Louise.
“I seen it in a travelogue they showed us in jail,” he said. “It’s supposed to be the prettiest spot in the entire world. Buddy and Bo could sure get lots of fishing done.”
“Baloney, let ’em fish in a ditch,” T.R. said. “I want to go to Disneyland and then Hollywood. Maybe I’ll be a movie star. Earl Dee wouldn’t dare kill me if I was a movie star.”
“But Lake Louise is a better hideout, just till they get him back in Huntsville,” Muddy argued. “It wouldn’t never dawn on him that we went to Lake Louise.”
“Bull,” T.R. said. “Nobody but Earl Dee knows what might dawn on Earl Dee. A man that would empty his gun into a washing machine don’t think like other people.”
“I’ve heard Colorado’s nice,” Gladys offered.
“We could easily lose ourselves in the Yucatan,” Godwin said.
“I’ve got an aunt in Saint Louis,” Buddy said. “She might not mind puttin’ us up for a while.”
“Please, I can’t stomach the Midwest,” Godwin said. “So few nice asses there.”
T.R. had been painting her fingernails while the debate raged. At some point she stopped in order to concentrate on her argument with Muddy, leaving the bottle of fingernail polish on the edge of the table. Jesse quietly appropriated the bottle and sat on the floor by the refrigerator, trying with poor success to paint her own fingernails. Finding the process tedious she had quietly dumped the remainder of the bottle on the floor and was spreading it around with her hands. T.R. and I noticed this at the same moment, and T.R. shrieked.
“Oh, my God, Jesse, what have you done now?” T.R. said.
Startled, Jesse held up her red hands. Realizing she had been caught in what might be considered a misdemeanor, she decided to try to charm her way out of trouble with her new word and a brilliant smile.
“Swim?” she said, hopefully.
“Oh, well, this means a trip to the store,” T.R. said, not really angry with Jesse. “I sure ain’t gonna show up in Hollywood with half my nails done and the other half not. Let’s write up a list of things we need on the trip, and me and Muddy will go buy them.”
“Go buy them yourself, I never agreed to go to Hollywood,” Muddy said. “You’re just a bully, T.R.”
“In every little family somebody’s got to be the boss, and in this little family it’s me,” T.R. informed him. She hugged his neck to show there were no hard feelings, but Muddy had hard feelings and went into one of his famous sulks. The rest of us quickly composed a list of dozens of items we might find useful on a trip to California.
“I bet we throw half of this stuff out, but that’s okay, we’ll buy it anyway,” T.R. said. She had acquired a cowboy hat at some point and set it jauntily on her head as she got ready for the shopping trip. Then she grabbed me and insisted that we dance a few steps to her own rendition of “The Tennessee Waltz.”
“When we get out there to L.A., we’re gonna work on your dancing, Daddy,” she said, giving me a little punch in the stomach. “You need to dance off some of that fat.”
“Why don’t you go shopping in the Cadillac while we load the van?” I suggested. “That way we’ll get off quicker.”
“These feet were made for dancin’, Muddy,” T.R. said, doing a suggestive dance around the kitchen in an effort to tempt him out of his sulk. “If you’re not careful they’re gonna dance right over you.”
“Couldn’t we just stop by Lake Louise on the way to California?” Muddy said—he was holding firm in his sulk.
“Forget it,” T.R. said, but she came closer—close enough to give him a juicy kiss.
“You don’t never let nobody win,” Muddy said, letting her pull him briefly into the dance.
“I got something else that’s made for something else,” T.R. said. “You don’t wanta see Lake Louise bad enough to risk losing my something else, would you?”
“You wouldn’t let me even if I wanted to,” Muddy said, disengaging himself. “I’m gonna take a nap before we start on this stupid trip if we’re really gonna go to L.A.”
“Come on, L.J., you gotta help me buy things, this list has got a million things on it,” T.R. said, snapping her fingers at me. The finger snap meant hand over the money, which I did, several hundred. At the last minute Buddy and Bo decided to go along to check out new fishing gear. As they left, Godwin was peering at the list, trying to determine if any essential delicacies had been left out.
I had every intention of getting on with the packing, but the excitements of the day had tired me a little, and before I could start I let myself be drawn into a
checker game with Jesse, while Gladys busied herself getting fingernail polish off the floor. Jesse was in high spirits; she had invented a new checker strategy that pleased her even more than throwing my checkers on the floor. Every time I threatened to jump one of her men she simply put her finger on my checker and held it pinned to the board. I pretended that her finger was the finger of Superwoman; no effort of mine, strain though I might, could possibly move a checker once her finger was on it.
This tactic amused Jesse so that she soon became hysterical with laughter. Every time I started to jump her she popped a small finger on my checker and dissolved into helpless paroxysms of laughter.
“That little girl, I love to hear her laugh,” Gladys said. She herself was exhibiting excellent spirits—post-coital euphoria, or so I assumed.
While Jesse and I were playing, Jesse subject to ever more prolonged fits of helpless giggling, the phone on the kitchen table rang and I picked it up.
“Mr. Deck, come quick, come quick,” an unfamiliar young voice said. Jesse had just put her finger on a checker; impatient with the interruption of the game, she tried to pull my free hand toward the checker-board.
“Come where, who are you?” I asked. Fear jammed into me like an arrow, almost closing my throat.
“I’m Jim at the filling station—come quick, Mr. Deck, he’s killed them all!” the boy said. “He just drove up to the unleaded and pulled that gun and killed them all.”
Still obeying Jesse, I concentrated enough to try and lift my checker, provoking another helpless gush of childish laughter. But Gladys, by the sink, looked at my face and paled. She had to grab the sink for support.